Friends,Now, more than ever, independent journalism has become the last firewall against government and corporate lies. Yet, with frightening regularity, independent media sources are losing funding, closing down or being blacked out by Google and Facebook. Never before has independent media been more endangered. If you believe in Common Dreams, if you believe in people-powered independent media, please support our critical Winter campaign now and help us fight—with truths—against the lies that would smother our democracy. Please help keep Common Dreams alive and growing. Thank you. -- Craig Brown, Co-founder

Support independent journalism. Common Dreams brings you the news that matters.Donate

Search form

'Climate Deniers' Follow 'Creationists' to Undermine Public Education

'Climate Deniers' Follow 'Creationists' to Undermine Public Education

by

Common Dreams staff

The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy,” according to a report by Think Progress.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial” [...]

Wojick will receive $25,000 per module, with four modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.

The Heartland Institute also runs the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a conspiracy-theorist parody of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heartland’s NIPCC project “pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.” Their climate-denial work is funded anonymously.

The full excerpt from the Heartland document:

Though troubling to both advocates of quality education and those concerned with the increasingly destructive impact of global warming and climate change, the Heartland's plans are hardly surprising. In fact, they follow a troubling trend among rightwing think tanks and the conservative movement to undermine education by generating and then inserting invented scientific controversy into public school curricula.

The battle to introduce 'creationist' curricula has been a perennial battle throughout the United States for Christian evangelicals, and now many in the "climate denial" industry have adopted similar methods to push their ideology in schools. As author and journalist, Katherine Stewart, wrote recently at The Guardian:

The convergence here is, to some degree, cultural. It just so happens that the people who don't like evolution are often the same ones who don't want to hear about climate change. It is also the case that the rhetoric of the two struggles is remarkably similar – everything is a "theory", and we should "teach the controversy". But we also cannot overlook the fact is that there is a lot more money at stake in the climate science debate than in the evolution wars. Match those resources with the passions aroused by evolution, and we may have a new force to be reckoned with in the classroom.

She also writes, citing specific legislation in Oklahoma and other states, that there are aspects of this new trend that make the "same old story more interesting than usual."

The other significant twist has to do with the fact that the new anti-evolution – make that anti-science – bills are emerging in the context of the most vigorous assault on public education in recent history. In Oklahoma, for example, while Senator Brecheen fights the forces of evolution and materialism, the funding for schools is being cut, educational attainments are falling, and conservative leaders are agitating for school voucher systems, which, in the name of "choice", would divert money from public schools to private schools – many of them religious. The sponsor of Indiana's anti-science bill, Dennis Kruse, who happens to be chairman of the Senate education committee, is also fighting the two battles at once.

###

THE LAST FIREWALL AGAINST THE LIES

Independent media has become the last firewall against government and corporate lies. Yet, with frightening regularity, independent media sources are losing funding, closing down or being blacked out by Google and Facebook. Never before has independent media been more endangered. If you believe in Common Dreams, if you believe in people-powered independent media, please support our critical Winter campaign now and help us fight—with truths—against the lies that would smother our democracy. Please help keep Common Dreams alive and growing.

Further

With evidence growing that prayer will not stop bullets from killing school children, the kids themselves are stepping up to be the grownups in the room and say the NRA and their fucking guns must go. Just down the road from the latest slaughter, they walked out of class and held livid, poignant signs declaring it's time to protect our kids, not their guns. The chorus swells. Vote all the blood-soaked lackeys out.